Friday, 4 May 2018

Amberlough

A spy and a love story in three acts, of which
the middle one is excellent, the first is an excessively detailed infodump, and
the third is a little too bleak for its own good. All this adds up to a good
book that needs, but repays (but then reclaims), quite a bit of patience.

Amberlough City is the capital of the
self-named region that surrounds it, one of the four semi-autonomous states of the
federation of Gedda. It’s a playground for what, in our world at least, we might
label Jazz Age hedonism, and we explore it through the eyes of Cordelia Lehane,
a burlesque dancer, Aristide Makricosta, her part-time MC and a full-time
smuggler, and Cyril DePaul, his lover and a spy. Over the course of the first
act it’s revealed that the far-right Ospie party is rising to power in one of Amberlough’s
sister-states, and Cyril is dispatched in order to subvert their planned theft
of the election. It goes wrong in a way I’m still not entirely sure about. In
fact I’m not entirely sure about a lot of things, exactly, but it all (eventually)
clicks into place when you realize that the Ospies are the Nazis and Gedda is a
simplified version of 1920s Europe. The middle section of the book takes us on
a rollicking gallop through a city in the throes of occupation, and it closes
in a frankly distressing manner as the noose tightens around our three leads
and all that they love.

All well and good. The biggest unanswered
question, however, is why this book is a secondary world fantasy at all. Even
the fantasy is pushing it, as there’s absolutely nothing here in terms of
technology, (lack of) magic, or social development that would be out of place
in the real world between the Wars. Is it just that the names have been changed
to protect the guilty? I suppose there’s an argument that having actual Nazis
as the bad guys would have been a little too on-the-nose, would have clashed
too strongly with, and distracted too much from, the whole demimonde tone Donnelly
reaches for (and by and large obtains). But even so, things got noticeably less
confusing (and thus more enjoyable) for me when I realised I could just map
events onto the ends of Weimar Germany and the Roaring Twenties, so why not
just cut out the middle man? The sequel will probably be out by the time you
read this (or very soon after), and despite it all I enjoyed the first installment
to come back for more.